Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. With more than 400,000 customers—including 100 of the Fortune 100—in more than 145 countries around the globe, Oracle is the only vendor able to offer a complete technology stack in which every layer is engineered to work together as a single system.

Forbes BrandVoice™ allows marketers to
connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create
content – and participate in the conversation – on the Forbes digital publishing
platform. Each BrandVoice™ is produced
by the marketer.
More on BrandVoice™ here
, or email us directly at
brandvoice@forbes.com.

Technology is changing Pittsburgh’s image from the steel city of the 1970s to a twenty-first-century hub for innovation. And much of that is due to the efforts of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). One area that is thriving is robotics—so much so that Pittsburgh may have to change its name to Roboburgh.

A select group of Roboburgh residents made the trip to another famous hub of innovation, Silicon Valley, to attend the Launch CMU event at OracleOracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, earlier this summer.

As CMU faculty and alumni began to showcase their inventions to possible investors, it quickly became clear that robots are much more than just a box-of-bolts android that can go out to the front lawn and pick up a newspaper. As Rob Daley, CEO and cofounder of CMU-incubated startup 4moms, puts it, “There is a whole lot of very core fundamental technology that’s related to robotics that’s really powerful and really important if you divorce yourself from the media concept of humanoid robotics.”

Daley’s company was just one of the many organizations that showed up to explain how they use robotics technology in their products. Representatives from 27 startup companies in industries ranging from healthcare to music were represented at the two demo and poster sessions, which bookended the showcase talks.

The showcase began with remarks from Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle Edward Screven, who is an alumnus of CMU’s Robotics Institute. After reminiscing about his days at college in the 80s and then at a young, 400-employee Oracle Corporation, he explained how robots are related to what Oracle does: “I see robots moving around and touching things and doing things. That’s, to me, an extension of that whole notion of hardware and software working together.”

Manuela Veloso, a professor of computer science at CMU, said the most powerful robots are the ones that can ask for help. The “CoBot” robots in Veloso’s lab use Java in an Android app as a GUI to enable humans to speak with the robots, providing an interactive capability Veloso called “symbiotic autonomy.” Java also powers an app that humans can use to summon the robots. “In our work, Java is used to enable robots to interact with people through phone apps or by accessing the web, or to visualize the robots’ state,” said Veloso.

Three growth-stage companies presented their robotics-based products at the showcase.

One-year-old Anki’s product is a racing game that allows players to race physical cars using artificial intelligence and a smartphone, and which learns each player’s unique racing style. “On the front end, Anki DRIVE is a racing game, but we do have a huge back-end infrastructure and an analytics team that looks at how people are using Anki DRIVE and then figures out where we should put our resources,” said Hanns Tappeiner, cofounder and president of Anki.

4moms, which bills its product as the “world’s most innovative stroller,” applies low-cost electronics and robotic concepts to products for juveniles.

Blue Belt Technologies is developing robotic-assisted tools used in orthopedic surgery. “During a surgery, the surgeon uses our computer navigation to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the patient’s anatomy, and then he takes that image and is able to plan the location of these implants before he even makes a single bone cut,” explained Director of Marketing and Clinical Services at Blue Belt Technologies, Inc. Adam Simone.

Whether these robots transform Pittsburgh into Roboburgh is yet to be seen. But one thing’s for sure: These aren’t your mother’s robots.

Source: iStockphoto

Guest post written byCurran Mahowald

Curran Mahowald was an Oracle intern during the summers of 2013 and 2014.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.